Posts Tagged ‘Windows’

I have to use Windows 10 Enterprise on a notebook for Work purposes once again and use a Docking station connected to an external Display Monitor at the Company Office work location one of the first things to configure is to disable LID Display Sleep on laptop close because otherwise the notebook has to be left opened almost half opened in order to work with the PC to change that unwanted behavior there is an easy way via Windows Control Panel configuration, here is how:

Open

Windows Control Panel

navigate to:

Power Options

choose:

Change advanced power settings, scroll down a bit to:

Power Buttons and lid (menu)

press over it from sub-menu

Plugged in

Select

Do nothing

That's all from now on closing the notebook when plugged in to the Dock station or to a direct External Monitor will no longer do the sleep.

As you can see from the menus, there is a lot of triggering rules to configure further from Power Management (Advanced Settings) on how applications / USBs / Multimedia and Hard Disks should behave under different power conditionsso if you have the time I recommend you go through them and check them for yourself.

You know on most operating systems such as Windows 8 / 10 , Mac OS X as well as GNU / Linux / BSDs (FreeBSD) etc. with graphical environments such as GNOME / KDE etc. , there is this default functionality nowadays that is helping to reduce eye strain and improve night sleep by modifying the light and brightness as well as coloring eminated by the monitor.

On Windows this technology is called Night Light and is easily enabled by nagivating through menus:

Even though Night Light / and redshift monitor color warmth change is often mostly useful and have a positive impact improving sleep as well removes eye strain on Linux my experience with it is not too positive as it changes the monitor color gamma and makes it often quite reddish and annoying even through a normal day and not only night time.
This makes the work experience on the computer not pleasurable thus just removing it for me and I guess for many would be a must.

Assuming that you have installed Free software OS such as Linux with redshift (note that on on older releases of Deb and RPM package based distributions: you will have to manually install it with something like:)

2. * Set the color temperature of the Monitor / Screen back to 6500K (this can be done either by the button menu that most screens have)

or manually with redshift itself by executing command:

root@linux:~# redshift -O 6500

As the screen is back to normal color gamma, its now time to completely remove redshift in order to prevent it to mess up with your monitor colors, on next PC boot or on Gnome / Mate whatever UI used session logout.

As explained in article the consequence of too many badly written or agressive behaviour Spider is the "server stoning" and therefore degraded Web Server performance as a cause or even a short time Denial of Service Attack, depending on how well was the initial Server Scaling done.

The bots we want to filter are not to be confused with the legitimate bots, that drives real traffic to your website, just for information

The 10 Most Popular WebCrawlers Bots as of time of writting are:

1. GoogleBot (The Google Crawler bots, funnily bots become less active on Saturday and Sundays :))

2. BingBot (Bing.com Crawler bots)

3. SlurpBot (also famous as Yahoo! Slurp)

4. DuckDuckBot (The dutch search engine duckduckgo.com crawler bots)

5. Baiduspider (The Chineese most famous search engine used as a substitute of Google in China)

Hence with the robots.txt unrespective bots, the case the only way to get rid of most of the webspiders that are just loading your bandwidth and server hardware is to filter / block them is by using Apache's mod_rewrite through

.htaccess

file

Create if not existing in the DocumentRoot of your website .htaccess file with whatever text editor, or create it your windows / mac os desktop and transfer via FTP / SecureFTP to server.

<Limit GET POST>
order allow,deny
allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot
</Limit>

Above rules are Bad bots prohibition rules have RewriteEngine On directive included however for many websites this directive is enabled directly into VirtualHost section for domain/s, if that is your case you might also remove RewriteEngine on from .htaccess and still the prohibition rules of bad bots should continue to work
Above rules are also perfectly suitable wordpress based websites / blogs in case you need to filter out obstructive spiders even though the rules would work on any website domain with mod_rewrite enabled.

Once you have implemented above rules, you will not need to restart Apache, as .htaccess will be read dynamically by each client request to Webserver

2. Testing .htaccess Bad Bots Filtering Works as Expected

In order to test the new Bad Bot filtering configuration is working properly, you have a manual and more complicated way with lynx (text browser), assuming you have shell access to a Linux / BSD / *Nix computer, or you have your own *NIX server / desktop computer running

Wannabrowser – is a web based browser emulator which gives you the ability to change the User-Agent on each website req1uest, so just set your UserAgent to any bot browser that we just filtered for example set User-Agent to CheeseBot

The .htaccess rule earier added once detecting your browser client is coming in with the prohibit browser agent will immediately filter out and you'll be unable to access the website with a message like:

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

Just as I've talked a lot about Index Bots, I think it is worthy to also mention three great websites that can give you a lot of Up to Date information on exact Spiders returned user-agent, common known Bot traits as well as a a current updated list with the Bad Bots etc.

There are also a third party plugin (modules) available for Website Platforms like WordPress / Joomla / Typo3 etc.

Besides the listed on these websites as well as the known Bad and Good Bots, there are perhaps a hundred of others that might end up crawling your webdsite that might or might not need to be filtered, therefore before proceeding with any filtering steps, it is generally a good idea to monitor your HTTPDaccess.log / error.log, as if you happen to somehow mistakenly filter the wrong bot this might be a reason for WebsiteIndexing Problems.

If you're a sysadmin who has to deal with cracker attemps for DoS (Denial of Service) on single or multiple servers (clustered CDN or standalone) Apache Webservers, nomatter whether working for some web hosting company or just running your private run home brew web server its very useful thing to inspect Web Server log file (in Apache HTTPD case that's access.log).

Sometimes Web Server overloads and the follow up Danial of Service (DoS) affect is not caused by evil crackers (mistkenly often called hackers but by some data indexing Crawler Search Engine bots who are badly configured to aggressively crawl websites and hence causing high webserver loads flooding your servers with bad 404 or 400, 500 or other requests, just to give you an example of such obstructive bots.

1. Dealing with bad Search Indexer Bots (Spiders) with robots.txt

Just as I mentioned hackers word above I feel obliged to expose the badful lies the press and media spreading for years misconcepting in people's mind the word cracker (computer intruder) with a hacker, if you're one of those who mistakenly call security intruders hackers I recommend you read Dr. Richard Stallman's article On Hacking to get the proper understanding that hacker is an cheerful attitude of mind and spirit and a hacker could be anyone who has this kind of curious and playful mind out there. Very often hackers are computer professional, though many times they're skillful programmers, a hacker is tending to do things in a very undstandard and weird ways to make fun out of life but definitelely follow the rule of do no harm to the neighbor.

Well after the short lirical distraction above, let me continue;

Here is a short list of Search Index Crawler bots with very aggressive behaviour towards websites:

Note that some of the listed crawler bots are actually a mirroring clients tools (wget) etc., they're also included in the list of server hammering bots because often websites are attempted to be mirrored by people who want to mirror content for the sake of good but perhaps these days more often mirror (duplicate) your content for the sake of stealing, this is called in Web language Content Stealing in SEO language.

You might want to tune that variable a Crawl-Delay of 20 instructs all IP connects from any Web Spiders that are respecting robots.txt variables to delay crawling with 20 seconds between each and every connect client request, that is really useful for the Webserver as less connects means less CPU and Memory usage and less degraded performance put by aggressive bots crawling your site like crazy, requesting resources 10 times per second or so …

As you can conclude by the naming of some of the bots having them disabled would prevent your domain/s clients from Email harvesting Spiders and other not desired activities.

2. Listing IP addresses Hits / How many connects per IPs used to determine problematic server overloading a huge number of IPs connects

After saying few words about SE bots and I think it it is fair to also mention here a number of commands, that helps the sysadmin to inspect Apache's access.log files.
Inspecting the log files regularly is really useful as the number of malicious Spider Bots and the Cracker users tends to be raising with time, so having a good way to track the IPs that are stoning at your webserver and later prohibiting them softly to crawl either via robots.txt (not all of the Bots would respect that) or .htaccess file or as a last resort directly form firewall is really useful to know.

– Below command Generate a list of IPs showing how many times of the IPs connected the webserver (bear in mind that commands are designed log fields order as given by most GNU / Linux distribution + Apache default logging configuration;

You can combine above basic bash shell parser commands with the watch command to have a top like refresh statistics every few updated refreshing IP statistics of most active customers on your websites.

Once you have the top connect IPs if you have a some IP connecting with lets say 8000-10000 thousand times in a really short interval of time 20-30 minues or so. Hence it is a good idea to investigate further where is this IP originating from and if it is some malicious Denial of Service, filter it out either in Firewall (with iptables rules) or ask your ISP or webhosting to do you a favour and drop all the incoming traffic from that IP.

Here is how to investigate a bit more about a server stoner IP;
Lets assume that you found IP: 176.9.50.244 to be having too many connects to your webserver:

( take in consideration that this info is provided only on current records from /var/log/apache2/ and is short term for long term statistics you have to merge all existing gzipped /var/log/apache2/access.log.*.gz )

To merge all the old gzipped files into one single file and later use above shown command to analyize run:

Though the accent of above article is Apache Webserver log analyzing, the given command examples can easily be recrafted to work properly on other Web Servers LigHTTPD, Nginx etc.

Above commands are about to put a higher load to your server during execution, so on busy servers it is a better idea, to first go and synchronize the access.log files to another less loaded servers in most small and midsized companies this is being done by a periodic synchronization of the logs to the log server used usually only to store log various filesand later used to do various analysis our run analyse software such as Awstats, Webalizer, Piwik, Go Access etc.

Worthy to mention one great text console must have Apache tool that should be mentioned to analyze in real time for the lazy ones to type so much isApache-top but those script will be not installed on most webhosting servers and VPS-es, so if you don't happen to own a self-hosted dedicated server / have webhosting company etc. – (have root admin access on server), but have an ordinary server account you can use above commands to get an overall picture of abusive webserver IPs.

If you have a Linux with a desktop GUI environment and have somehow mounted remotely the weblog server partition another really awesome way to visualize in real time the connect requests to web server Apache / Nginx etc. is with Logstalgia

Well that's all folks, I hope that article learned you something new. Enjoy

As John Romero shared himsef the game is actually inspired by Super Mario Bros so he decided to create a kinda of computer remake of the game in his teenage years and he did a great job yeah 🙂

There are similarities between Super Mario and Dangerous Dave as both have the secret levels, the level design, the monsters, and the jump all around collecting cups with a final aim to end up in the level exit door.

The game was originally developed for Apple II and later reworked and ported to DOS and because of it is immerse popularity Dave 2, 3 and 4 come out short

"Dave is a redneck on a rampage to reclaim his stolen trophies from the town bully, Clyde! Dangerous Dave is back in his classic adventure in the Deserted Pirate's Hideout. This recreation of the original 1990 DOS game is just as action-packed and difficult as the original! There are only 10 levels, but, wow, are they hard. "

I have to say the game controls are pretty much amazing and the game controls even though reimplemented on the Iphone touch screen device are truly amazing so gameplay resembles pretty much the Computer original game keyboard controls and in a sense the touch screen controls are a little bit more convenient.

The iOS Dave port is pretty nice and updated version is also available which is possible to be chosen on Game entry screen so you either play classic mode or you play the Dave in the Deserted pirated hideout updated version and sound Dave remake, below is a screenshot of the updated GUI version:

Our generation people born in 1983-1986 who are now about 33 years old has grown up with this game and I'm pretty sure if you happen to be one of those people will truly enjoy to replay the quick 10 game levels and remind the fuzzy computer arcade games age when every growing kid like me was obsessed with the idea to play and complete as much as games possible with countless nights in front of the Green and Black screen and later on SVGA screensgeeking on and on loosing idea of time and space and being completely sunk by the game.

If you're Windows user like me with a Linux / FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD – a dedicated Unix user and end up working for financial reasons in some TOP 100 Fortune companies (CSC, SAP, IBM, Hewlett Packard,Enterprise, Oracle) etc. and forced for business purposes (cause some programs such as Skype for Business Desktop Share does not run fine on Unix like and thus you have to work notebook pre-installed with Windows 7 / 8 or 10 but you're so accustomed to customizations already from UNIX environments and you would like to create yourself the Windows to resemble Linux and probably customize much of how Windows behaves by default.

Here is what I personally did on my work Windows 7 Enterprise on my HP Elitebook notebook to give myself the extra things I'm used to my Debian Linux Desktop.

Perhaps there is plenty of other goodprograms to install on Windows to make it feel even more like a Linux / Unix Desktop host, if you happen to somehow stuck to this article and you've migrated from Llinux / BSD desktop to Windows for work purposes please share with me any other goodies you happen to use that is from *Unix.

If you travel frequently and use your Windows 7 OSed PC in Coffee Clubs and various locations including Airports or public places, you might want to also obfuscate Windows's login screen to prevent it to be easily recognizable you're on a Windows by its default Blue and all known Login and Lockout screns for security or just for personal fun show off your l337 Skills to your colleagues at work and in this article I'll shortly explain how this is possible on Windows 7 the same is easily possible to do also on Windows 8 and Win 10 and I'll explain this as well in a separate article some time I have time in future.

In Windows 7 by default the Login Screen background is identical to its Lock Screen, one that appears on Windows (button) + L combination and through which if the computer is once locked you can login by pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL key combination, after which standardly you're either prompted for your password or if its a Domain connected corporate PC you're asked for your PIN or picture password.

Windows 7 Users: Set a Custom Login Background

To use a custom login background in Windows 7, you need to

1. Do Windows Registry edit – in order to enabled custom backgrounds2. And then store the image you want in a special Windows folder.

Step One: Enable Custom Backgrounds in Windows 7

For Windows 7, the ability to set a custom logon background is intended for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to customize their systems, but there’s nothing stopping you from using this feature yourself.

As I said prior Windows 7 background change feature is disabled by default, so you’ll have to enable it from the Registry Editor. You can also use the Group Policy Editor if you have a Professional version of Windows (or you're configuring the background for a a whole bunch of Domain run Windows PCs).

In the right pane, you’ll see a value named OEMBackground. Note that, If you don’t see that value, you’ll need to create it by right-clicking the Background key, choosing

New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value

and then naming the new value “OEMBackground.”

Double-click the OEMBackground value to open its properties window, set its value to 1 in the “Value data” box, and then click “OK.”

!! Be Aware that !!:
If at any point you decide to select a new theme in the Appearance and Personalization window, this will reset above already made registry value.
Selecting a theme will change the value of the key to the value stored in the theme’s .ini file—which is most likely 0.
Thus in case you do change theme, to have the background be the custom set make sure you don't forget to perform the Registry tweak again.

If you're running a Windows Professional or Windows Enterprise alternative way to set custom background is to directly change using the Local Group Policy Editor instead. The advantage of using Local Group Policy Editor to set a custom Login or Lockout screen background is it will be kept persistent even if you change your themes.

To do it via LGPE,

Launch Local Group Policy Editor by pressing Start, typing “gpedit.msc,” and then hitting Enter.

drill down to the following location:

Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Logon

On the right, you’ll find a setting named “Always use custom login background.” Double-click that setting and, in the setting’s properties window, select “Enabled” and then click “OK.”

Next step is to actually set the image you want to use.

Finally Set the Custom Background Image of choice

You can use any image you like, but there are two things you’ll need to keep in mind:

!!Your image must be less than 256 KB in size. !!

You may need to convert your image to something like JPG format to make that happen.
Try find image that matches the resolution of your monitor so it doesn’t look stretched.

Windows looks by default for the custom logon screen background image in the following directory:

C:\Windows\System32\oobe\info\backgrounds

Also defaultly, “info” and “backgrounds” folders donesn't exist, so you’ll need to navigate to C:\Windows\System32\oobe folder and create the subfolders on your own.

After creating the foldersC:\Windows\System32\oobe\info\backgrounds

Copy whatever background image_whatever.jpg you want to the backgrounds folder and rename the image file to “backgroundDefault.jpg.”

If you are using Windows 7 or Windows 8 Operating System inside a corporate network and your notebook PC is inside domain controller controlled by some crazy administrators who for some reason decided to remove the Taskbar from your Taskbar tray you have come over to exactly same situation like I do here.

Actually some might have experienced an icon "combined" feature which gives the opportunity of some of the standard Tray icons we know since Windows 98 / XP onwards to not show full time in order to save you space. No doubt this feature is great one to use as it is distracting sometimes to have a tons of applications constantly keeping in the Taskbar (right down corner) however if the Active Domain admin did it without any notification and you're a kind of victim you might dislike especially since this behaviour is making you impossible to easily control your phone / headspeakers and mic.

If you check in the Control Panel and click on Sounds menu in Windows 7/8, you don't see any checkbox for adding the icon back as I have assumed, , but instead all the audio there you can only see the inputs and outputs on your system general settings.

This behavior was made on purpose and makes sense cauze the taskbar icons since Win XP (if not mistaken) has to be controlled by the taskbar settings pan.

Thus in order to bring back the disappeared icon on Winblows 7 / Win 8 there is a taskbar properties feature enabling to to hide or view the various taskbar running apps in that number the Volume icon, hence to bring back your Volme Control speaker icon to taskbar you need to customize it.

To do so do a mouse Right-click anywhere on the taskbar and choose Properties.

Now, click on the Customize button under Notification area.

In Notification Area Icons dialog box, there is 2 ticks to check. Assure yourself the volume icon default behavior is set to

Show icon and notifications like in below screenshot

To make the new behaviour active click on Turn system icons on or off.

One thing to note here is the volume icon shoukld be set to On like in below| shot:

If the reason for the disapperance of the Volume controller in task is not due to Domain Controllear policty it could happen due to late updates pushed by Microsoft if the PC needs a restart or after computer Log offoperation.
Another reason for the casual disappearance of sound box could be also a buggy driver, so if the icon keeps disappearing over and over again, you better try to update the driver for your sound card.

However if you end up in a Windows Domain Controller (AD) Policy that is prohibiting the Sound Voulme to appear on your taskbar like in my case all the above won't help you solve it, but luckily there is an easy way to invoke the Volume Control dialog box via

sndvol.exe

the command will bring up the Volume Control as in upper left corner of screen like in below screenshot:

If you to show it with a silder use -f flag

sndvol.exe -f

Running just

sndvol.exe

opens the volume mixer, as you noted.

On windows XP the respective command to open a missing Volume Control dialog in taskbar, use instead:

sndvol32

command from Windows Command Prompt:

Start -> Run ->cmd.exe

sndvol32

no params to display master volume window

sndvol32 -x

to display small master volume window

sndvol32 -t

to display volume control only (as per sound icon)

If you have the Volume Controller behavior to be hidden or you need to view any other taskbar hidden application icon it will be useful for you to use:

AutoHotKeyWin+B to focus on the system tray, Left (arrow) to highlight the Volume Control icon , and then Enter to bring up the popup.

A good tip you might be interestted to use occasionally is how to show the current Wireless networks via a command (if that's prohibited otherwise via GUI) so you can easily see the Connected Networks on Windows using cmd:

If you're into IT industry even if you don't like installing frequently Windows or you're completely Linux / BSD user, you will certainly have a lot of friends which will want help from you to re-install or fix their Windows 7 / 8 / 10 OS. At least this is the case with me every year, I'm kinda of obliged to install fresh windowses on new bought friends or relatives notebooks / desktop PCs.

Of course according to for whom the new Windows OS installed the preferrences of necessery software varies, however more or less there is sort of standard list of Windows Software which is used daily by most of Avarage Computer user, such as:

– (WinDirStat or SpaceSniffer – Tools that can show you which is the biggest files and directory inside a directory tree)
– WinGrep (Grep: Grep for Windows)
– Everest Home Edition ( Hardware System Information – Shows you what is the PC hardware )

I tend to install on New Windows installs and thus I have more or less systematized the process.

I try to usually stick to free software where possible for each of the above categories as a Free Software enthusiast and luckily nowadays there is a lot of non-priprietary or at least free as in beer software available out there.

For Windows sysadmins or College and other public institutions networks including multiple of Windows Computers which are not inside a domain and also for people in computer repair shops where daily dozens of windows pre-installs or a set of software Automatic updates are necessery make sure to take a look atNinite

As official website introduces Ninite:

Ninite – Install and Update All Your Programs at Once

Of course as Ninite is used by organizations as NASA, Harvard Medical School etc. it is likely the tool might reports your installed list of Windows software and various other Win PC statistical data to Ninite developers and most likely NSA, but this probably doesn't much matter as this is probably by the moment you choose to have installed a Windows OS on your PC.

For Windows System Administrators managing small and middle sized network PCs that are not inside a Domain Controller, Ninite could definitely save hours and at cases even days of boring install and maintainance work. HP Enterprise or HP Inc.Employees or ex-employees would definitely love Ninite, because what Ninite does is pretty much like the well known HP Internal Tool PC COE.

Ninite could also prepare an installer containing multiple applications based on the choice on Ninite's website, so that's also a great thing especially if you need to deploy a different type of Users PCs (Scientific / Gamers / Working etc.)

Perhaps there are also other useful things to install on a new fresh Windows installations, if you're using something I'm missing let me know in comments.

Getting CPU information, RAM info and other various hardware specifics on Windows from the GUI interface is pretty trivial from Computer -> Properties
even more specifics could be obtained using third party Windows software such as CPU-Z

Perhaps there are plenty of many other ones to get and log info about hardware on PC or notebook system, but for Windwos sysadmins especially ones who are too much in love with command prompt way of behaving and ones who needs to automatizate server deployment processes with BATCH (.BAT) scripts getting quickly info about hardware on freshly installed remote host Win serverwith no any additional hardware info tools, you'll be happy to know there are command line tools you can use to get extra hardware informationon Windows PC / server:

The most popular tool available to present you with some basic hardware info is of course systeminfo

Now though systeminfo's hardware details and installed Windows KBXXXXX OS Hotfix patches are getting lists the command does not provide you with info about system’s BIOS, thus to get this info you'll have to use also wmic (Windows Management Instrumentation Command).

So What Is WMIC?

WMIC extends WMI for operation from several command-line interfaces and through batch scripts. Before WMIC, you used WMI-based applications (such as SMS), the WMI Scripting API, or tools such as CIM Studio to manage WMI-enabled computers. Without a firm grasp on a programming language such as C++ or a scripting language such as VBScript and a basic understanding of the WMI namespace, do-it-yourself systems management with WMI was difficult. WMIC changes this situation by giving you a powerful, user-friendly interface to the WMI namespace.

WMIC is more intuitive than WMI, in large part because of aliases. Aliases take simple commands that you enter at the command line, then act upon the WMI namespace in a predefined way, such as constructing a complex WMI Query Language (WQL) command from a simple WMIC alias Get command. Thus, aliases act as friendly syntax intermediaries between you and the namespace. For example, when you run a simple WMIC command such as

Here is how to wmic to get PC Motherboard serial numbers, CPU and BIOS details:

C:\> wmic bios get name,serialnumber,version

Above will print name if your BIOS, current version and it’s serial number if there is any.

If you need to get more info about the specific Motherboard installed on host:

C:\> wmic csproduct get name,identifyingnumber,uuid

This command will show motherboard modification and it’s UUID

If you want to quickly get what is Windows running hardware CPU clock speed

C:\> wmic cpu get name,CurrentClockSpeed,MaxClockSpeed

Also if you have turbo boost CPUs above command will help you find what’s the Max Clock Speed your system is capable of for the current hardware configuration.

If you do have dynamic clock speed running, then add this line, will refresh and monitor the Clock speed every 1 second.